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BEHIND THE DOOR
Jonny Millard, MD and founder of UK Fire Door Training, discusses why effective fire door safety depends on turning regulation into everyday practice
After years of building safety reform, there are two questions I think we should be able to answer with confidence by now: how do we know the person carrying out safety-critical work is competent to do it, and how do we help competent people prove it?
For fire doors, those questions are still harder to answer than they should be, and I think the industry needs to be honest about that.
I spend much of my working week training the people who install, inspect, and maintain fire doors, so I hear first-hand about the challenges they face.
The Building Safety Act, the Fire Safety( England) Regulations and the competence frameworks that have followed have brought much greater attention to competence.
I can see the impact on the front line. People have a better understanding of their responsibilities and they’ re asking more questions, which is progress. But there’ s still far too much uncertainty around how somebody demonstrates their competence and what good evidence looks like.
Our recent industry research found that 78 per cent of respondents knew what the Building Safety Act was and 71 per cent felt confident in their understanding of SKEB( skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours).
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